The problem with the history of 20th-century Europe, asserts the author, is that everyone thinks they know it. The great stories of the century - the two world wars, the rise and fall of Nazism and Communism, female emancipation - seem self-evidently important. But behind the grand narratives, the politics and the ideologies, lies another history: the history of forces that shaped the lives of individual Europeans. This is the thrust of Richard Vinen's survey of this uniquely destructive and creative century.

Winner of the Templer Medal and the Wolfson History Prize Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller Richard Vinen's National Service is a serious - if often very entertaining - attempt to get to grips with the reality of that extraordinary institution, which now seems as remote as the British Empire itself. With great sympathy and curiosity, Vinen unpicks the myths of the two 'gap years', which all British men who came of age between 1945 and the early 1960s had to fill with National Service. This book is fascinating to those who endured or even enjoyed their time in uniform, but also to anyone wishing...

Fresh, compelling ... an important book, revealing that 50 years on, 1968 is still unfinished business Andrew Hussey, Financial Times

A thoughtful, readable account of a moment in history that deserves to be dwelt on Andrew Marr, The Times

1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary - around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer-term implications; terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights...